I got a treat last week when I read a little blurb in the Library of Congress blog about the recently digitized Morgan Collection of Civil War Drawings. This set contains more than 1,600 eyewitness sketches made during the US Civil War. I don’t have a direct URL for you, but go to http://lcweb2.loc.gov/pp/mdbquery.html and start your search with Morgan Collection of Civil War Drawings.

That’ll give you 1655 results, from “The Veteran” to “Death of Reynolds — Gettysburg.” Each search result listed the date of the drawing and the artist; if you want to get fewer details but see thumbnails of the images click on the “Preview Images.”

Images have their own detail pages, which includes information about the medium of the drawing, any copyright restrictions, and additional notes. There’s a slightly larger version of the image as well. Click on that and you will not get an even larger image, but you will get the option to download archival quality versions of the images. Note: some of these images are pretty huge; the TIFF version of an 1864 snowball fight sketch I downloaded weighed in at over 125 MB.

If you’re looking for something specific, just add keywords to that initial “Morgan Collection” search — it’ll narrow down your results a lot. I added battle to the initial phrase and got 556 drawings.

Civil War history buffs, don’t miss it, especially if you liked the images from the Becker Collection. And don’t miss the links for the larger image downloads.